Personalization: A Multi-faceted Approach

In the past few years, I’ve heard a litany of common requirements from client to client.  They include social, mobile, and personalization.  While social and mobile  gather all the buzz, we spend a surprising amount of time focusing on what a personalized experience really means.  I find a lot of people understand what personalized is but don’t understand some of the basic and mechanics of personalization.  For that reason, I’m going to post a five part series on it.  I’ll cover:

1. Personalization as Security
2. Customization
3. Atribute based personalization
4. personalization based on what your do or what you by (Think Amazon)
5. Event based personalization or rules based personalization

Personalization as Security

at least 60% of the time, people are thinking of security when they say personalization.  In other words, when you login, we know who you are and the portal reacts to you based on what we authorize you to see and not see.  Let me give you some examples.

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John logs into the portal. He’s a manager for his store and because of that, he has access to some information and reports not otherwise available.  Upon login, he see his homepage which consists of:

1. Company news
2. The last three blog posts from the CEO
3. An embedded video for the last training available
4. The company’s latest stock price
5. Three charts outlining and comparing yesterdays, last week’s and last months sales numbers.

The reports display because John belongs to the managers group and only he is authorized to see it.  You can think of this as some of the most basic personalization.  It works well for macro needs like only allowing leaders to see certain reports and content or like arranging what people see in a workspace based on roles.

It fails miserably when you start to apply attributes like only show this to managers who manage stores in the southwest region.  It also doesn’t even touch peoples preferences when a site user tells you they want to subscribe to all content related to Nordic skiing.  But in it’s own way it’s still powerful and forms a core of personalization.

All other personalization stems from it.  I say that because all other personalization takes authorized content, transactions, and applications and pushes it at the user based on a variety of factors.  The key there is that they only see authorized content.  That’s why security is the first aspect of personalization.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about customization.